A Provoking Agent: The Pornography and Performance Art of Annie Sprinkle Author(s): Linda Williams Source: Social Text,

No. 37, A Special Section Edited by Anne McClintock Explores the Sex Trade (Winter, 1993), pp. 117-133 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466263 Accessed: 11/04/2010 01:38
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A Provoking Agent
THEPORNOGRAPHY AND

ART PERFORMANCE OF ANNIE SPRINKLE

My feministmotherused to come into my room and joke whetherI would growup to be a whoreor an artist.She was exactlyright! -Annie Sprinkle1 The career of Annie Sprinkle is a peculiarly American success story. Beginning her professional performance career as a masseuse, soon after becoming a whore, Sprinkle next expanded into burlesque and live sex shows, then to writing for sex magazines and performing in pornographic films and videos (where she eventually became a director). In a later stage of her career, she moved to such venues as the Franklin Furnace, Performing Garage, and other avant-garde performance spaces. In her recent one-woman show entitled Post-Post Porn Modernist, she performs a parodic show-and-tell of her life as a sexual performer. This show includes inviting audience members to shine a flashlight at her cervix through a speculum. In 1990, while she was giving this performance in Cleveland, the municipal vice squad forced her to omit the speculum component of her act. It is a fascinating comment on American culture that when Sprinkle performed live sex shows in that same city she was never visited by the vice squad.2 Performance artists, especially women performers whose gendered and sexed bodies serve as the basic material of the performance, are often vulnerable to vice squads, or to censorship by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA),because their art and thought occur through the body. Defenders of performance art have thus often found it necessary to distinguish this art from pornography.3 While I agree that this art is not pornography, I am suspicious of attempts to too vigorously draw the line between performance art on the one hand and pornography on the other.4 My tactic in the following essay, therefore, will not be to establish the precise moment when Annie Sprinkle became a performance artist, nor to argue, as Chuck Kleinhans has done, that Sprinkle has always been a performance artist,5 but rather to show how her myriad sexual performances tend to blur the boundaries between the two. This, I shall argue, is the particular genius, as well as the limitation, of Sprinkle's postmodern feminist agency. Annie Sprinkle's work demonstrates that the political context in which we ponder the questions of sexual obscenity can be safely confined to the wings of sexual representation. For as gender and sexual identities have

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become more politicized, and as "speaking sex" has become as necessary to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, sadomasochist activists as it has to Jesse Helms, drawing clear lines between what is dirty and what is clean, what is properly brought on scene and what should be kept off (ob) scene, no longer seems the crux of a feminist sexual politics.6 A recent reviewer of Post-Post Porn Modernist claims, mistakenly I think, that Sprinkle's performance "strips away all porn," as if vehement denial of all pornographic elements purifies the art.7 Such a claim relies on the kind of hierarchicalbinary between art and pornography, and between artist and whore, that Sprinkle's art and pornography challenges. The phenomenon of Annie Sprinkle forces us to ask: what is the political value, in terms of women's agency, of not drawing a firm line between obscene pornography on the one hand and legitimate art on the other? As the quotation that forms the epigraph to this essay suggests, Annie Sprinkle has a way of defusing, and going beyond, rather than directly confronting, familiar oppositions. In this quotation the feminist mother poses the question of her daughter's vocation as an opposition: will her daughter be an artist or a whore? Without confronting the mother directly, the "postfeminist," "postporn" daughter counters her either/or with a destabilizing agreeability: "my mother was right!" The daughter unsettles the familiar opposition: she is neither artist nor whore but artist and whore. Can Annie Sprinkle's performance of the postmodern, "postfeminist" sexual role "woman" accomplish the feminist goal of being for women? Does she represent a new permutation of feminist agency that moves beyond some of feminism's most troubling binary oppositionsbeyond, for example, the opposition that posits pornography as inimical to women; beyond the opposition that posits pornography as inimical to art; beyond the opposition that posits women as powerless victims of male sexual power and thus as colonized in their desires? Or, is Sprinkle more simply a symptom of a "postfeminism" that has been accused, most recently by Tania Modleski, of being an end to feminism, a reversion to prefeminism?8 How, in other words, shall we interpret this postfeminist sensibility emerging so agreeably from the "depths" of a misogynist mass culture? Like Modleski, I reject postfeminism if it is taken to mean that the goals of feminism are either irrelevant or already achieved. However, I understand the political and social realities that have led many women to reject the term feminism, to claim to be beyond it, when to my way of thinking they are still embedded within its struggles. One of the reasons for this rejection has been the association of feminism with an all-or-nothing understanding of what is good for women, with often self-righteous positions that claim to know which side of any binary a "proper" feminism belongs.
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Sex workers have often found themselves on the "wrong" side of these binaries. For sex workers have all too often been regarded by feminists as objectified victims of an aggressive, sadistic, masculine sexuality rather than as sexual agents themselves. Antipornography feminists in particular have gone so far as to define pornography as "the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women" in which women are dehumanized sexual objects "presented as whores by nature."9 For the DworkinMacKinnon antipornography faction, agency can only be located in resistance. Yet in Annie Sprinkle we encounter a whore-turned-pornographerturned-performance artist with more of a stake in the "post" than in the "anti" that constitutes much of the feminist position taken on this subject. This essay suggests that we take seriously the whore side of Sprinkle's performances by examining, first, her early work as a whore and, then, how this whore persona informed her later work as a pornographer and performance artist. My hope is that this examination may help us to clarify the nature of a postfeminist sexual agency that has brought obscenity so aggressively on scene. Another hope is that the case of Annie Sprinkle might be used to clarify a larger argument on the essentialist or nonessentialist meaning of the name "woman." In Am I That Name? Denise Riley, for example, has argued the value of a poststructuralist refusal of the name "woman" as reducing women to fixed identities which then work to reduce women's agency.10 Feminism does not need the fixed category "woman," Riley argues. Against this poststructuralist position, Tania Modleski has argued the importance of maintaining the name "woman" as an essential category.1 Modleski points out that Riley's title, a quotation from Othelloin which Desdemona asks Iago if she is the name her husband has given her, ignores the fact that the name Othello actually gave Desdemona was not "woman" but "whore." Riley's point is that the name "woman" has become an essentialist trap. Her poststructuralist argument is that women lose agency if reduced to the singularity of this name. Modleski, however, suggests that Riley's elision of that other name, "whore," illustrates why the feminist use of the essentialist name "woman" is politically important. "Although women have had to take up the term 'women' emphatically to rescue it from opprobrium, they have done so in opposition to patriarchy's tendency to 'saturate' us with our sex."12 Annie Sprinkle represents one possible feminist position of agency arising out of the embrace of this saturation. As a postmodern, postfeminist, postporn performance artist, Sprinkle has not eschewed the term "whore" or the sexual saturation of woman. Rather, her sexual performances, firmly rooted in the specific conventions of pornography and the persona of whore, are provocative instances of agency that draw upon the performative traditions of the sexually saturated woman without simply
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duplicating them. By performing sex differently, though still within the conventional rhetoric and form of the genre, Annie Sprinkle demonstrated a provocative feminist agency that would fruitfully contribute to her later feminist performance work.

From Masseuse to Whore Let's begin with Annie Sprinkle's first sexual performances, the ones she writes about in her early sex magazines, then later in her book Post Porn Modernist (not to be confused with her performance piece, Post-Post Porn Modernist), and in her interview in Angry Women.These writings are all versions of Sprinkle's life story, which she has been writing and performing, initially for specialized sex magazines, since the early seventies. In every version of this story, Sprinkle tells us that she did not know she was a prostitute until she was linguistically hit over the head-or, in Althusser's terms, "hailed" or "interpellated"-by this discourse. I was workingin a massageparlor.For 3 monthsI workedand didn't even know I was a hooker-I was havingsuch a good time!The men I saw were But referredto as "clients"or "massages." finally,afterabout 3 monthsone womanused the word "trick"and I realized,"Ohmigod-they're tricks! Oh shit-I'm a hooker!"'3 At first she believed the performance for which she was paid was the massage. The money "was for the massage plus a tip," while the sex "was just something I threw in for fun!"14 "I just thought of myself as a horny masseuse. I liked having sex with the guys after I gave them a brief massage. When it finally did occur to me that I was a hooker, and I got over the initial shock, I enjoyed the idea."'5 Now we could interpret this reasoning as the false consciousness often attributed to sex workers by antipornography feminists. But false consciousness assumes the existence of a "true" or authentic consciousness betrayed by the persona of the "happy hooker." It is this idea of an "authentic," "true" self that Annie Sprinkle's account of her experience contradicts. For she only recognized herself as whore-one who performs sex for money-in the word "trick." She never chose-in any liberal, Enlightenment sense of the exercise of free will-to become a whore. Sprinkle found herself "hailed" by an entire system of signification.16But her inability to choose does not necessarily mean that she is discursively constructed by a misogynist system over which she has no control, or that she is the victim of misogynist false consciousness. In what sense, then, can we speak of Sprinkle's agency in the deeds that make her first a whore and then later an artist?

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The answer involves the thorny question of how and in what way there can be agency in the presence of a subject who preexists the discourses in which he or she is situated. In other words, if there is no subjectivity prior to discourse, if subjects are constructed in and by an alreadyexisting cultural field, and if, as in Annie Sprinkle's case, that cultural field "interpellates"the woman who performs sex for money as having the identity of whore, then what hope is there for that woman's ability to "act otherwise" if she doesn't act against the system that constructs women as whores and objects of pornography? Feminist postmodern theorist Judith Butler offers one answer to this problem when she writes that "the question of agency is not to be answered through the recourse to an 'I' that preexists signification."'7 Rather, Butler argues, agency needs to be reformulated as a question of The rules that how agents construct their identities through resignification. enable and restrict the intelligible assertion of an "I"-rules, Butler reminds us, that are structured by gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality-operate through repetition. Signification itself is "not a that both conceals itself and processof repetition founding act, but a regulated enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effect ... ." Agency is "located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition." In other words, there is no self prior to the convergence of discursive injunctions to be something (whore, mother, heterosexually desirable object, etc.). There is only, Butler writes, "a taking up of the tools where they lie."18 For Annie Sprinkle, these tools were initially the remarkableopportunity for repetition in the sexual acts performed by a whore. If, as Butler argues, the self is constructed out of the repetition of performances, and if agency occurs within the possibility of variation, then Sprinkle'srepetitious performances of sex acts have been the locus of her construction of self throughout her career. In this first instance of sexual performances in which she first wasn't, and then was, hailed a whore, we can see the discovery of an agency that is not opposed to, but rooted in, the discourse that constructs her. Her agency could be said to consist in the fact that, in the repetition of the performance of sex, first for free, then for money, she realizes that "whore" does not fully name who she is. Sprinkle neither denies that she is a whore nor fights the system that so names her. Rather, she accepts the nomination; but in that acceptance also sees room for what Butler calls "subversive repetition." This subversive repetition becomes an articulation of something that is not named in "whore"; her own desire. There is no other scene of Sprinkle's agency: the scene of the ob-scene is the place where she is able both to "act otherwise" and still to "be herself." A whore performs sex for pay, usually for a single customer. The sexual performance must please the customer and not necessarily the perA Provoking Agent
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former, who may or may not be caught up in its art or excitement. Because the performer is so restricted in the nature of the performance, remarkably little is said about the quality of performance within the customer-whore transaction. Though it is often acknowledged that this performance can be either perfunctory or inspired, it is not an area of performance that is taken very seriously by the traditions of Western art. It is, however, taken seriously in an Eastern, tantric tradition to which Sprinkle has been recently drawn, as well as in the narrativesof pornographic films and videos which are almost obsessively about quality and quantities of sexual performance. All of Sprinkle's performances begin by taking this performance of sex for the pleasure of a customer or viewer very seriously and by linking this performance to the fundamental contract by which the whore agrees to please the john by showing him her "secrets." When Annie describes herself as a "hooker with a heart of gold," she does so without mockery, without intention of demeaning the profession of whore, and without intention of subverting the whore's basic function of performing sexual acts that give pleasure.19She does not rail against the basic dichotomy that divides women into good girls and whores.20The art of her performances consists in what she can do by way of subversive repetition within this basic contract, not in refusing or opposing it, but in finding her desire cultivated and satisfied within it. In the whore phase of Annie Sprinkle's career, these subversive repetitions consist of an ever-widening range of sexual acts, or "perversions," which broaden the understanding of sexual performance and the range of sexual objects conventionally not regarded as acceptable objects of desire-dwarves, burn victims, transsexuals, persons with AIDS,amputees, etc.-which allow her to explore her desires in new ways.

From Whore to Pornographer Deep insideAnnie Sprinkle, the 1981 porno film which Sprinkle wrote and directed, is consistent with her early writings as well as her later performance work in its first-person direct address in the persona of the whore speaking to the client. "Hi, I'm Annie. I'm glad you came to see me. I want us to become very intimate. . ." Intimacy here consists, as in the discourse of the whore, in showing and telling sexual secrets that please. Yet intimacy with a flesh-and-blood client is the one thing that is not possible within the mediated form of porno film and video; the whore-client relation of proximity is necessarily replaced, and in a sense compensated for, by the ideal visibility of sexual performers who are not physically there with the spectators viewing the film. Yet the woman who performs with
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another performer for the camera remains a kind of whore, replacing sexual performance with and for the pleasure of one with sexual performance for an audience of many. In most contemporary feature-length hard-core film and video this shift to the audience of many entails the abandonment of the female sexual performer's address to the client.21 Annie Sprinkle, however, maintains the paradoxical, quasi-parodic rhetoric of intimate address to the client who is no longer really there in the introduction to each of this film's numbers. Her pornography thus makes a point of retaining the literal voice of the whore whose name is inscribed in the Greek word "pornography," literally, whore-writing: the graphos (writing or representation) by pornei (whores). This word needs some explanation. Though Andrea Dworkin has made much of the word's continuity from antiquity,22in actual fact, our contemporary notion of pornography, as writing or images depicting sexual activities with the aim of arousal, bears little relation to the meaning of the word in antiquity. Classicist Holt N. Parker writes, for example, that pornographoswas simply a subcategory of biography-tales of the lives of courtesans-which may not contain any obscene material at all.23Parker notes, however, that another subspecies of literature-an-aiskhunto-graphoi, literally, writers of shameless things-more properly corresponds to the erotic content of contemporary pornography. These works, known today only secondarily and from fragments, correspond to our contemporary sex manuals, putatively based on the writer's personal experience, describing various methods of heterosexual intercourse.24 Though the writing of these manuals was ascribed to women, this was not because of any proven female authorship but because the excesses of sexuality-which for the Greeks included pleasures that rendered participants ecstatically out of control and out of possession of themselves-were conceived in antiquity as feminine. Active, in-control sexuality was associated with the free man who "penetrated, who moved, who fucked" and who could also abstain from doing so if he chose. Women, on the other hand, like slaves and boys, were the passive penetrated, who did not move, who were fucked, and who had no power to abstain. Thus, while women were the authorities on shameless things, they had no real authority or agency in speaking them because they lacked the ultimate cultural value of self-control.25 Parker borrows Joanna Russ's formulation of the classic double bind applied to this literature: "No proper woman writes about sex; therefore the writing is not by a woman. And if she does write, she's not a proper woman."26Since this class of writing about shameless things most closely corresponds to the kind of advice-giving that Annie Sprinkle, speaking from her whore persona, offers in Deep inside Annie Sprinkle, it is worth
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considering whether this same double bind erasing women's sexual agency still operates today. In traditional pornography, "whores" (whether literally so or simply women who, because they speak of sex, are automatically "shameless") write of their experience of sex for the pleasure of men. These experiences must be presented as pleasurable for the genre to function. A whole generation of feminist performance artists has aggressively and angrily broken the contract to provide pleasure and thus grounded their performance art in an attack on pleasure that uses the tools of obscenity. Annie Sprinkle differs from these performers in that she does not rupture the whore's contract to provide pleasure. Instead, she goes back to its roots. In taking on the persona and address of the whore hailed by misogynist culture, she opens up a field of acting otherwise through subversive repetitions of the role. Moving-image pornography, like prostitution, offers the perfect occasion for repetition since it requires some variation of sexual performances to relieve the monotony of the seven to ten numbers conventionally offered by the feature-length form. In this film, Annie Sprinkle, self-designated "porn star,"tells the conventional pornographic narrative of her sexual evolution from shy, nonglamorous, nonsexual "Ellen" to the sexually fulfilled, exhibitionist Annie. The basic structure of this narrative, which is full of advice about what positions are the most pleasurable, thus assumes the educative function that extends back to the sex manuals of antiquity. What is different in Annie Sprinkle's "whore writing," however, is that she injects elements into this narrative that disrupt the active male/passive female paradigm of conventional pornography. She begins by displaying a scrapbook of photos that are the "real" pictures of herself as an awkward girl growing up. These pictures of the ordinary, nonglamorous woman are unsettling. While they do not suggest that this is the true woman while the fetishized Annie is false, neither do they suggest, as conventional whore writing does, that the "true" woman is the fetishized desirable one. Instead, they suggest the very constructedness of the woman's identity and Annie's ability to manipulate the codes of glamour. The film also introduces an uncommon note of social reality with photos of Mom and Dad and the family and the mention of their efforts to accept her role in the "sex business."27 Having established that the persona who addresses us is not "naturally" glamorous and sexy, Annie next asks her absent client-viewer if "he" would like to see "what I would love to do to two husky men right now." Happening across two husky naked men arm wrestling before a fireplace, she admires their bodies, kisses their muscles, and inserts herself between them to initiate a three-way number that ends with the conventional porno "money shot"-external, and therefore visible, ejaculation by
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the male.28 This threesome is perfectly conventional for eighties porn. What isn't conventional is the homoerotic context of the display of glistening male muscles, Annie's verbally articulated delight in their bodies, and her active control of the situation ("what I would like to do"). Moving on to the next number, still addressing an absent "client," Annie asks if he likes "big tits." "You may have noticed I have rather large ones... ." She then introduces Sassy, a "girlfriendwho loves big tits." The number with Sassy is the conventional "lesbian" duo interrupted and completed by a male intruder. What isn't conventional is Sassy's very short stature (her mouth comes to Annie's breasts), Annie's use of her breast to stimulate Sassy's clitoris, and Sassy's sustained, body-shuddering (performance of) orgasm, which takes place before the man arrives. The third number introduces anal intercourse performed on Annie and ending in a conventional money shot on her lower back. What is different in this number is its beginning in Annie's verbal celebration of anal eroticism, in this case her pleasure in a man's ass: "You ever wonder why I keep my middle nail short? Now take this ass for example. .. " Without our ever seeing the man's face, Annie continues her "dirty talk" instructions for fingering a man's ass while performing the deed. Only after she has completed her play with his anus does his play with hers commence. Annie's "objectification"of the man's ass and her instructions on how to give anal pleasure to a man are unconventional preludes to her own more conventional anal penetration. It is possible to see them as simple table-turning: the objectified woman fragments and objectifies the male body in turn. But perhaps more challenging to the conventional porno film is the fact that here too Annie maintains the first-person address to a hypothetical client, speaking to the camera and thus raising new questions about the gendered nature of her address. Is she telling and showing a hypothetical "him" how to finger another man's ass? If so, the film insidiously transgresses "normal" heterosexual taboos against males penetrating males. Is she telling and showing "him" how she likes to finger a man's ass? If so, the pleasure depicted casts her in the role of active penetrator and him in the role of penetrated, again a switch in expectations for the conventionally posited heterosexual male viewer. Or, is she perhaps telling and showing a hypothetical "her" how to finger a man's anus? After all, this is eighties porn and women are included in its address. If so, the original rhetoric of the female-whore addressing the male-client breaks down. Any way you look at it, Annie has played with the conventions of who gives pleasure to whom. The fourth number is even less conventional; it constitutes one of Annie's specialties, and at least one source of her name. We could call it the female money shot. Annie performs it first alone, then after intercourse with a male partner. This partner performs his money shot as the
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conventional climax to intercourse while Annie does hers before his, on her own, so to speak, and then as a kind of topper after. This exhibitionistic display of female pleasures that are usually, in post-seventies movingimage pornography, internal and invisible, is clearly based on the male competitive "mine is bigger than yours" or "anything you can do I can do better" model. "You want visible proof of my orgasms measured against the standard of yours?" Annie seems to say, "Well, here it is!" In this most spectacular of her performances the female body might be said to parody the male body's obsession with measurable quantities of ejaculate and projective force of expulsion, except that, if it is a parody, it is not one that automatically destroys the erotic terms of the performance. We have seen that Annie Sprinkle's performances take as their starting point the role of the whore whose first commitment is to deliver the goods: the performance of "sex" in a culture in which such performances can be bought. I have argued in Hard Core that contemporary hard-core film and video pornography particularly locates the climactic pay-off of those goods in the invisible interior of women's bodies. The genre's frenzy of the visible is thus a contradictory desire to see the involuntary, convulsive proof that a woman's pleasure is taking place measured against the standard of a male "norm." However, since "normally" the woman's pleasure is not seen and measured in the same quantitative way as the man's, and since visual pornography also wants to show visual evidence of pleasure, the genre has given rise to the enduring fetish of the male money shot. One of the first "corrections" of the new pornography by and for women was to eliminate this convention. The films of the Femme Production group offered clean sheets, handsome men, and no money shots. Annie Sprinkle's directorial contribution to this effort-a half-hour segment of Rites of Passions (Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera, 1987), called The Searchfor the UltimateSexual Experience-conformed to this standard as well. But suppression of the masculine standard for the exhibition of pleasure is only one strategy for acting otherwise. Annie Sprinkle's strategy in this earlier work, as well as later in The Sluts and GoddessesVideo Workshop: How to Be a Sex GodOr dess in 101 Easy Steps (Annie Sprinkle and Maria Beatty, 1992), where she exhibits not only a female money shot but also the performance of a sixminute orgasm, would seem to so spectacularly imitate the male standard of the pornographic evidence of pleasure as to destabilize and denaturalize its "normal" meaning. Anyone with some experience of hard-core film and video must marvel at these orgasmic performances. We might say, in an adaptation of Luce Irigaray'sterm, that recognizing the extent to which orgasm is one of the basic "goods" of porno, Sprinkle decided to market her goods with a difference. This difference is measured in the degree of discrepancy and
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de-formation produced in repetitions that destabilize the very sense of what delivering the goods is.29 At the Society for Cinema Studies panel on Annie Sprinkle ("Sprinkle, Sprinkle, Little Star: Permutations of a Porn Star," May 1992), there was considerable debate about the nature of Sprinkle's orgasmic performances, which were screened at the panel. While I argued that Sprinkle had performed a female version of a money shot, fellow panelist Chuck Kleinhans insisted that I had misconstrued golden showers for female ejaculation.30Kleinhans maintained that Sprinkle tells us we are seeing ejaculation for primarily legal reasons, since urination is legally actionable in some localities. Another panelist, Chris Straayer, also perceived that the liquid was ejaculate but argued a different significance than I had: a liberatory return of the repressed female ejaculation. Why, Straayer asked, has women's ejaculation been censored in the very pornography that has placed so much emphasis on visible proof of pleasure if not as a means of continuing to reproduce female "lack"? The debate suggests how insistently pornography catches up its viewers in the impossible question of the ontological real of pleasure. Each of us has a fantasy of this real corresponding to our ideological investments in pleasure. I see Sprinkle playing with the conventions of the hard core "frenzy of the visible" and exhibiting agency in the parody of masculine money shots; Kleinhans sees a greater affirmation of agency in the greater taboo of golden showers; Straayer sees a greater agency in the exhibition of a self-sufficient female sexuality in female ejaculation. The important point, however, is not to determine the truth of what the female body experiences, but rather the variety of different truths that can be constructed and the fact that they are constructed here by a female pornographer who is clearly in control. Pornography is all about the supposedly true and natural but actually constructed bodily confessions of pleasure. Annie Sprinkle shows the extent to which even the whore locked in the contract to please the customer, making confession of the "shameless things" of sex, can speak differently-not necessarily more truthfully-of these things. In a broader sense, however, we might consider the basic marketing of the "shameless goods" of Annie Sprinkle herself. Sprinkle is the fetishized woman par excellence. Though she will later metamorphose into an oscillation between the two equally valued states of slut and goddess, in this earlier pornography the self-conscious masquerade of femininity is of the whore who aims to please. But as we have seen, there is enough of a Mae West-style exaggeration in this persona to alert us to an element of parody. The gap-toothed, big-breasted, slightly chubby woman who addresses us in her sexiest voice and who has already shown us the prewhore, pre-porn body out of which this new persona was constructed,
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presents herself as an effect of performance. As in her later how-to-do-it diagrams in which she draws arrows to parts of her body to show how a particular fetish effect was achieved, or in the famous bosom ballet in which she performs a dance with painted yin/yang breasts, she invites us to admire a performance, the truth of which is always elusive. The gap between the performed imitation of the sex goddess and the "original" on which that imitation is based creates an effect not unlike that of the drag queen. Although Sprinkle "is" a woman and doesn't perform otherwise, her exaggeratedly fetishized femme appearance is offered as a performative achievement, not as natural. Judith Butler writes that "in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself."31Sex and gender are denaturalized in drag by a performance that avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity. In a recent documentary about tantric sexual seekers, Sacred Sex (Cynthia Connop, 1992), Annie Sprinkle tells us in an interview that in her Post-Post Porn Modernist performance piece she takes on the persona of a "porno bimbo character." This could sound as if she performs a demeaning imitation of such a character, as if the parodic repetition criticizes the inauthenticity of the original. However, in neither of the performances of this role does Annie Sprinkle assume that there is a "proper" or "normal" female identity from which this construction diverges. Her parody of gender and desirability thus reveals, as Butler puts it about drag, "that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin."32 Parody causes laughter. But this laughter does not chide the imitative failure of this character with reference to a better, "truer"woman. It might be more appropriate, then, to speak of Sprinkle's parody-her subversive repetitions of sexual performances, her "porno bimbo character" played to the hilt-as more properly a form of pastiche. The term has been invoked in a manner critical of postmodernism by Fredric Jameson, who argues that our contemporary postmodern condition is replete with parodies that have lost their ability to criticize and hence their ability to laugh. Such parodies degenerate to mere pastiche: imitations that mock the very notion of an original. Jameson argues that without the feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is comic, pastiche becomes blank parody, "parody that has lost its humor."33 It is precisely this notion of "norm" and "original," however, that is at issue in a postmodern world of sexual identities and representations. We have seen that laughter at sexual pleasures that diverge from some "norm" is a familiar feature of contemporary culture. All the more reason, then, to welcome the pastiche with humor that does not posit a corrective norm, but which continuously plays with the terms of normand perversion.
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This is what Annie Sprinkle does best. Sprinkle is proof, as Judith Butler puts it, that "the loss of the sense of 'the normal' . . . can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when 'the normal,' 'the original' is revealed to be a copy ... an ideal that no one can embody."34

From Pornographer

to Performance Artist (a Sketch)

These, then, are some examples of the strategy of the "post"-postmodern, poststructuralist, postfeminist-in the early work of Annie Sprinkle. While this work is not yet performance art and not yet postporn, we can see in it the seeds of an evolution that is beyond, but never against, porn. Annie Sprinkle's persona will go on to include the sex educator, the sex therapist, the sexual fairy godmother, and the sex goddess-all personae that are reworked into the Post-Post Porn Modernist theater piece. In each new permutation, Sprinkle never denies or criticizes her whore-porn origins. For example, in The Sluts and GoddessesVideo Workshop: Or How to Be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps (produced and directed by Maria Beatty and Annie Sprinkle, 1992), Sprinkle becomes a "legitimate" sex educator proffering more knowledge than pleasure. Yet the interest of the tape is its combination of clinical knowledge and raunchy enjoyment, the participatory hands-on, pornographic nature of this particular sex educator's show-and-tell. Once again Sprinkle has gone to the roots of the form-sex manual advice on the best positions-and transformed it without directly opposing it. If, as the classicists tell us, pornographic sex manuals by putative women for the pleasure of men are the true origins of what we today call pornography, then this "workshop" exclusively by and discursively addressed to women, yet still imbued with all the naughtiness of conventional pornography, is their reappropriation. This reappropriation is certainly not free of the conventions of pornographic sex manuals for men. In this video, for example, Sprinkle repeats her performance of the female money shot, and goes on to measure the duration of an orgasm with a graphic insert of a digital clock (5 minutes, 6 seconds). This image of the sex educator flexing her orgasmic muscles is still similar to that of the whore-pornographer in Deep inside Annie Sprinkle. In both cases duration and ejaculation are emphasized. In both cases a parody pastiche of masculine conventions dominates. Yet in this video, orgasm is no longer performed for the pleasure of a discursively addressed male viewer. Other women in the video facilitate the orgasm and function as audience cheerleaders. In the Post-Post Porn Modernist performance piece, the orgasm is a solo and the point is the self-sufficiency of the female body.
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We have seen that Annie Sprinkle's spectacular orgasms are the constant feature of each one of her pornographic, educative, or art performances. We have also seen the subtle ways in which these orgasms take on new meanings in different contexts. The point about these orgasms is never whether they are real or performed, showered with ejaculate or urine, parodic or sincere, since with Annie Sprinkle there is never an either/or but always a this/and. These orgasms can be taken as indices of a very different sexual agency than that which obtained for the whore writers of antiquity. For the Greeks the rigid dichotomy between passive penetrated and active penetrator corresponded to the feminine and the masculine positions. Pleasure was always on the side of the uncontrolled female and, as in the famous argument between Zeus and Hera about who had the most pleasure in sex, always operated to the detriment of female agency in the social sphere. The woman's pleasure, quantified as inherently greater than the male's, was out of control and in excess, while the masculine pleasure of penetrator was capable of control and not in excess. The female body remains today the one more "saturated" with sex. The insatiable, "excessively" pleasuring woman remains caught in the familiar double bind by which her knowledge of sex invalidates other forms of authority-we can think, for example, of Arlen Specter and the Senate Judiciary Committee's dismissal of Anita Hill's charges against Clarence Thomas as sexual fantasy and displaced desire. Nevertheless, despite the very real operation of this harmful double standard, the sphere of the sexual now occupies so much greater an area of social concern and social power that participation in sexual pleasure no longer automatically signifies the same powerlessness it did for the Greeks. This is why it is important not to conflate today's pornography with that of the ancients, or indeed, with that of any other time. And this is why sex-positive Annie Sprinkle and her spectacular orgasms can suggest quite another strategy for "acting otherwise." I would make no claim for the resisting, subversive potential of Annie Sprinkle's strategies outside the realm of the sexual. And certainly sexual performance is not the solution to a great many of the problems of women. But Annie Sprinkle shows that within the realm of the sexual, performances of bosom ballets, female money shots, and six-minute orgasms can sometimes work wonders. For sexuality today is a thoroughly commodified arena of self-help and self-fulfillment requiring levels of selfcontrol and agency that would have baffled the Greeks. While it was once the case that a mind/body split relegated men to the realm of the spirit, women to the realm of the body, placing the blame of male lust on women, today sexual pleasure is far too important a commodity for women not to seek their own desire and agency in it.
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Notes
1. Annie Sprinkle, Love Magazine 83 (n.d.), 4963. 2. Cindy Carr, "War on Art: The Sexual Politics of Censorship," Village Voice,5 June 1990, 28. Sprinkle called her performance piece, performed at the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, a demystification of the female body. She describes the burlesque club where she performed live sex as the "wildest" place she ever worked, commenting that the vice squad was unconcerned about that obscenity because it was confined to "the porn ghetto ..." But now that it's something for me ...." See ibid., 27. 3. Art critic Linda Burnham writes, for example, "I went to Cleveland for this performance [Annie Sprinkle's performance at the Cleveland Performance Art Festival], and performance art critics don't come any more credentialed than I do, and I declare it: Annie Sprinkle is a performance artist and this performance was art, not pornography." See Burnham, in High Performance(1990), 13. In his paper at the 1992 Society for Cinema Studies, "When Did Annie Sprinkle Become an Artist? Female Performance Art, Male Performance Anxiety, Art as Alibi, and Labial Art," Chuck Kleinhans has shown that Burnham's defense of Sprinkle is based both on an appeal to authority and on the location of a specific point in Sprinkle's career when she ceased to be pornographic and became art. Something of the same discriminating assertion occurs in performance artist Linda Montano's "baptism" of Annie Sprinkle and Veronika Vera as artists while the two were in attendance at Montano's upstate New York summer camp in 1987. See Linda Montano, "Summer Saint Camp 1987," Drama Review 33, no. 1 (Spring 1989), 94-103. The assumption in these defenses is that Annie Sprinkle became a performance artist when she began, as she herself puts it, to deconstruct "mainstream images about what is sexy" ("Queen of Kink Not Taking It Lying Down," Los Angeles Times, 5 September 1990, Fl 1) rather than simply to arouse. I hope to show, however, that Annie Sprinkle's performances never obey such simple dichotomies. 4. This line drawing, like the line drawing between the erotic and the pornographic, almost always depends on who you are and what turns you on (or off): pornography, as Robbe-Grillet once said, is the eroticism of the "other." In other words, if it turns me on, it's erotic; if it turns you on, it's pornographic. Performance art as a whole has been condemned by the New Right philistines as pornography, on the assumption that some creep, not me, gets turned on by the material, or as bogus art. Here is Tony Kornheiser in a recent piece in the Washington Post: "I'm not exactly sure what it is-other than it seems like everybody who does it gets naked. Does that mean when I'm taking a shower, I'm a performance artist? Because if that's the case I want the NEAto spring for the soap" (9 February 1992, 3). At the other extreme of this position is the condemnation of performance art as pornography. Attacks on performance art, like attacks on pornography, oscillate between the assumption that any engagement of the body is excessively obscene-showing what should never be shown-or excessively ordinary-the naked body in the shower. 5. Kleinhans, "When Did Annie Sprinkle Become an Artist?" 6. See my "Pornographies On/Scene, or Diff'rent Strokes for Diff'rent Debate, ed. Lynne Segal and Folks," in Sex Exposed:Sexuality and the Pornography Mary McIntosh (London: Virago, 1992). In this article I suggest that the word "obscene," which literally means "off scene," no longer functions to refer to gen-

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uinely hidden things, sexual or otherwise. In our contemporary sexual politics the more proper term is on/scene. 7. Quoted in the documentary film, Sacred Sex (Cynthia Connop, 1992). 8. Tania Modleski, Feminismwithout Women: Cultureand Criticismin a "Postfeminist" Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), 8. 9. These are excerpts from the Minneapolis ordinance authored by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon; see Appendix II of Womenagainst Censorship, ed. Varda Burstyn (Vancouver: Douglas & MacIntyre, 1985), 206. in 10. Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminismand the Categoryof "Women" History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 11. Modleski, Feminism without Women,16-17. 12. Ibid. 13. Andrea Juno and V. Vale, Angry Women(San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1991), 24. 14. Ibid., 26. 15. Annie Sprinkle, Post Porn Modernist(Amsterdam:Torch Books, 1991), 13. 16. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 122-73. 17. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 143. 18. Ibid., 145. 19. See Juno and Vale, Angry Women,26. 20. This is why she is out of place in an anthology called Angry Women. 21. Many stag films, however, still retain this discursive address. See Linda Williams, Hard Core:Power,Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 58-92. 22. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography:Men Possessing Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 23. Holt N. Parker, "Love's Body Anatomized: The Ancient Erotic Handin books and the Rhetoric of Sexuality," in Pornographyand Representation Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 91. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 99. 26. Dworkin, Pornography,93. 27. It is worth noting that this shot of Mom and Dad is held so briefly that their faces are not actually discernible, apparently out of consideration for their feelings. 28. I discuss the form and function of this money shot in chapter 4 of Hard
Core.

29. I am alluding here to Luce Irigaray's notion, in the essay "When the Goods Get Together," that women as commodities have been prostituted to men as "goods." Irigaray suggests that these goods should refuse to go to market. However, she also raises another possibility-which she goes on to reject-that the goods might "go to market on their own . . . enjoy their own worth among themselves, to speak to each other, to desire each other, free from the control of seller-buyer-consumer subjects." See Luce Irigaray, This Sex WhichIs Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 197. I have suggested in Hard Core that the Femme Productions group of female pornographers, to which Annie Sprinkle belongs, represents a

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form of the "goods" getting together to market themselves differently (pp. 24850). I am suggesting here that Sprinkle's marketing offers a subtle revision of what these goods are. 30. His argument was based on his perception that liquid emerged from the urethra and not, as I thought, the vagina. 31. Butler, Gender Trouble,137. 32. Ibid., 138. 33. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in TheAntiAesthetic:Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 114. 34. Butler, Gender Trouble,138-39.

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